Poetry Suite Ross Robbins
“the
nurse not far off with the
syringe full of calm”
Poetry by Ross Robbin
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Mental hospital
There are four patients to a room. One roommate with neurological damage shuffles and drags his right side along like a parasitic twin. He goes to bed naked and is on his belly on top of the blankets when I enter. And I would enter, I would enter, I would enter. I would cut off my left half and his right, sew our good halves together, we would be beautiful and lithe, a gazelle, we would cheek our meds and spit them out and we would triumph, ascend, combust like victorious bombs.
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Mental hospital
Kim thinks that she’s in a Tolkien novel about schizophrenia, it would seem. She is certain that Paul and I are warlocks from the future who have come to cast evil spells on her lungs. When the techs try to shower her she thinks they are plotting to kill her with pneumonia, and screams as much. She wears three coats at once, and there are water bottles in every pocket. The lids are off of a couple when a staff member comes in for the tackle, the nurse not far off with the syringe full of calm. The water sprays and Kim, in her five or six layers of cheap, smelly clothing, goes down. She is screaming about wizardry and spells and her own inevitable death. “That lucky bitch,” says Paul as they stick the needle in.
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Mental hospital
After the first seizure there’s blood on my forehead and the bridge of my nose where the concrete caught me. My tongue is made of blood and someone cut it open and stuffed a kitchen sponge inside it.
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Mental hospital
There is a black market for lighters and anything sharp. There is a black market for feelings and genitals. There are way too many people fucking. There is a black market for yesterday. I’m snorting someone else’s Ritalin and I need you to give me a cigarette.
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Mental hospital
Some people are scrambled here, white noise on spindly legs. When their mouths open, only static comes out. They are powerless to contain the squalling bursts of snow and black water sprayed from their jagged teeth and tongues. After a while their eyes get quiet.
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Mental hospital
We all sleep on the second floor of a paper bag, nervous like fawns. How desperately we cling at some sense of community. The wards are tumors metastasizing over the hospital’s barren womb.
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Ross Robbins lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. His poems have appeared. He likes to make chapbooks at the Independent Publishing Resource Center—his self-published creations “80 Poems” and “I want to say how I feel and be done with it forever” are on sale now at Powell’s Books. Read more of his work: here.